On Tuesday armed police arrested National Coloured Congress (NCC) leader and MP Fadiel Adams at his parliamentary village home in Cape Town, on charges of fraud and defeating or obstructing the course of justice.
He is alleged to have interfered with the investigation into the 2017 assassination of former ANC Youth League secretary-general Sindiso Magaqa.
Adams, cigarette in hand, chatted to journalists from a police van on live television.
Whatever the merits of his specific case, the spectacle was instructive. In SA, the investigation of a political assassination can itself become a crime scene — layered with alleged interference, intelligence operatives, and questions about who, ultimately, is being protected.
This is not the beginning of the Magaqa story. It may not even be the end. But it is the right moment to ask the question that SA has been avoiding for too long: whose money paid for that ambush? And whose lifestyle depends on us never finding out?
Magaqa was 35 years old when they shot him — a ward councillor, a former ANC Youth League secretary-general, a son of Ibisi township in Umzimkhulu, a community that sits at the geographic seam of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, at the very margins of political visibility.
What drew the crosshairs onto him was not faction alone. He had raised repeated concerns with the executive committee of Umzimkhulu municipality about the upgrade of Umzimkhulu Memorial Hall, whose budget had ballooned from R4m to R37m.
When his concerns were ignored, he handed documentary evidence to a friend in the provincial executive, which was then escalated to the South African Revenue Service (Sars), the Treasury and the Hawks. He followed every rule. He used every structure. He did everything the system asks of a responsible citizen.
On the evening of July 13 2017, Sindiso and two other local politicians were ambushed when they stopped at a general store near his home. About 15 shots were fired into their car. He was critically injured. He died at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital in Durban on September 4 2017. Thirty-five-years old.
Now follow the money.
A hall that should have cost R4m cost R37m. That is R33m that found its way into somebody’s pockets — somebody who ate well, slept soundly and felt sufficiently threatened by one honest councillor to arrange his death.
This is what I want us to sit with. Not the abstraction of “corruption”. Not the bureaucratic language of “procurement irregularities”. I want us to follow the money all the way to its logical, murderous conclusion.
Corrupt officials do not simply steal. They build. They build assets, lifestyles and networks of complicity. They build a world in which the stolen rand becomes a school fee, a mansion in their home village, a sectional title, a vehicle and a life of impunity. And then — critically — they build a wall around that world. A wall maintained not by bricks but by bullets.
Whistleblowers are not killed because they are dangerous people. They are killed because the money is dangerous. Every person who speaks up is a direct threat to the architecture of looted wealth. The assassination of a whistleblower is, in the coldest terms, a cost-benefit calculation.
A human life measured against a balance sheet. And in too many South African municipalities, the calculation keeps coming out the same way. In Magaqa’s case, the corruption reached into the very institutions meant to protect him.
Reports later revealed that three police officers based at KwaZulu-Natal crime intelligence headquarters were allegedly involved in financing the killing through a slush fund.
Magaqa was reportedly killed during covert operations known as “Project Blow Out” and “Project Wave”, tasked with assassinating politicians and sowing distrust within the ANC. The vehicle driven by the hitmen, and the weapon used in the attack, were both reportedly purchased using a Secret Service account.
Let that settle.
Public money — taxpaying citizens’ money — was used to buy the weapons that killed a man trying to protect public money. The corruption did not merely fund a getaway; it funded the infrastructure of its own protection. It weaponised the state against the very citizen the state exists to serve.
The Madlanga commission has heard how Crime Intelligence members were allegedly linked to Magaqa’s murder. Nine years later, we are still excavating how deep the rot goes — and a sitting MP’s arrest last week, on charges of allegedly interfering with the hitman at a sensitive stage of the investigation, suggests the architecture of obstruction is still very much active.
Meanwhile, those who bear witness to the witnesses are also targeted.
Thabiso Zulu and Les Stuta made national headlines at Magaqa’s funeral when they told mourners he had been assassinated for uncovering tender fraud related to the community hall. Zulu made the same allegations before the Moerane commission.
The public protector found that the failure by the minister of police and South African Police Service (SAPS) to provide security protection for Zulu and Stuta exposed them to the risk of assassination.
The state did not act on that finding. A month after being shot in an ambush, Zulu remained without protection. “Something has got to give now,” he said. “I am not going to take this lying down. I am without protection and I remain vulnerable.”
He wore his gunshot wounds, in his own words, as “a badge of honour” — a badge the state refused to protect.
Babita Deokaran chose to be a witness. She was a senior financial officer in the Gauteng department of health who discovered what was happening at Tembisa Hospital and decided the public had a right to know.
She was shot and killed outside her home in Johannesburg shortly after dropping her daughter off at school. The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) later confirmed that over R2bn had been syphoned from Tembisa Hospital through fraudulent, overpriced tenders for personal protective equipment, furniture and food. Six men pleaded guilty and were sentenced. The masterminds remain at large.
Someone bought furniture and luxury vehicles with public money. Someone else arranged the bullet that ended Deokaran’s life. These are not separate transactions. They are the same transaction — opposite ends of the same ledger, where stolen public funds appear as assets, and murdered witnesses appear as solved costs.
SA has the Protected Disclosures Act. We have the SIU, the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) and now the Political Killings Task Team under Gen Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi. A hitman has been convicted and sentenced to 25 years.
In Magaqa’s murder case, a former municipal manager has been re-arrested. In October 2025, the alleged mastermind appeared in the Pietermaritzburg high court — eight years after the assassination.
Eight years.
Eight years is a long time to wait for justice when you are the family of a man killed at 35 for doing the right thing. It is an eternity for his still grieving mother, who in 2023 was held at gunpoint at her home by two unknown men, who went on to ransack the house looking for evidence of corruption the deceased might have hidden. It is an eternity when you are living without protection, carrying someone else’s bullets in your body, and still — still — speaking.
Our laws are not the problem. Our will is: the political will to follow the money all the way to the top; to charge the people who commissioned the kill, not just the ones who pulled the trigger; to treat the murder of a whistleblower not as a closed case when the hitman is convicted, but as an open case until the money is recovered and the masterminds are named.
This week’s arrest of Adams may prove to be exactly what his legal team says it is — politically motivated overreach. Or it may reveal yet another layer of a system determined to protect itself. The court will decide.
But the pattern is not in dispute. In South Africa, the path from corruption to murder is short, well-worn and rarely reversed. The corrupt steal. The stolen wealth buys silence.
When silence cannot be bought, it is enforced. And the people brave enough to refuse that enforcement pay a price that no law, no commission of inquiry and no posthumous award can adequately name.
Magaqa tried to stop R33m from disappearing into someone else’s future.
That future killed him.
Until we are willing to dismantle it — asset by asset, rand by rand, indictment by indictment — we are not serious about protecting the people who risk everything to tell us the truth. We are merely serious about honouring them at their funerals.
- Magaqa is an award-winning journalist, media innovator and founder and CEO of Citizen TV Africa.
